The Trick to Enjoying This Season of ‘Mr. Robot’: Think of It Like a Video Game

In the penultimate episode of Mr. Robot's second season, Portia Doubleday's Angela Moss has been kidnapped and trapped in a room with a girl who looks no older than ten years old. We don't know her name or why she's there, only that she is sitting behind an old computer and asking Angela if she has ever cried during sex. It is only the second strangest thing to happen on Mr. Robot this year, after the show somehow managed to squeeze in an extended ALF cameo after only sixteen episodes on the air.

Angela's predicament is a fascinating bit of surreal character work—one that, as our own Scott Meslow points out, has "everything to do with claiming her personal agency." It's a character shift wrapped in a riddle, but there's a bit more to that riddle that's worth examining, and a lot of it has to do with some very old video games not a lot of people really play anymore. More specifically, the entire scene is constructed like an old graphic adventure game from the '80s and '90s—and understanding how could do a lot towards helping your understanding of the show.

A graphic adventure game (or "adventure game," for short) might be more familiar to you than you think—if you've played Oregon Trail, or a number of educational games like it, you've played an adventure game. In an adventure game, you don't really control characters directly; instead, you click around in order to have them interact with things Push that button, pick this up, talk to that person, and so forth. Adventure games were never really about action, they were about puzzles—there was somewhere you needed to go, and an obstruction in your way. You had to figure out how to get around obstacles and solve mysteries, usually in strange and byzantine ways.

A scene from the 2009 director's cut of 'Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars' a 1996 adventure game that started with players investigating a murder involving a mime

In many adventure games, opening a locked door was never as simple as finding the key—because finding the key was never an option. But if you could make your captor cry he'd drop one thing you could combine with another thing that would lead to a ridiculous trail of breadcrumbs that wouldn't end in you opening the door, but instead jury-rigging a means to blow the whole damn wall down. I'm not making this scenario up, by the way—adventure games could be haunting or mundane or outlandish or very funny, but they all had one thing in common: They all required the player to adjust the way they thought about the world, and adopt the odd, sometimes mad logic of how the game worked.

In a similar fashion, Angela is presented with a byzantine set of obstacles keeping her in this strange room, and away from any answers. There's the girl, her questions, an old Commodore 64, a rotary phone, a kitschy inspirational poster, and an old copy of Lolita. She can either make it out alive or dead, with answers or without them. It's up to her to interpret this room, and how to negotiate its locked door.

In its second season, Mr. Robot has made it increasingly clear that it is a show that insists on playing by its own rules, even if it has made the show difficult to watch at times. But if there's one thing the show has wanted to exhibit more than anything else—even more than its Fight Club-esque anit-consumerist mantras—it's control. Mr. Robot is one of the most meticulous shows on television, one that isn't shy about taking advantage of the unreliable nature of its protagonist or withholding major plot points in the pursuit of a more daring, cerebral structure that puts its characters and viewers through the ringer to become the rare series that really is impossible to predict where it will go next. But that doesn't mean it isn't playing fair.

Game designers work to make you forget what you can't do—much like Mr. Robot works to make you forget about what it's not telling you.

Adventure games, much like Mr. Robot, lived and died by how fair they were perceived to be. They were about establishing a logic to abide by—often a bizarre and funny one, so puzzle solutions seemed like punchlines to jokes you didn't even know were being set up—and training yourself to think in these strange terms. Games like Day of the Tentacle or Sam and Max Hit The Road did this by creating colorful, odd worlds with larger-than life characters that you wanted to interact with, often because they were hilarious. More pensive adventure games like Myst crafted serene environments with creepy undertones that made things feel not quite right, and drove players to find out more.

Similarly, Mr. Robot's seemingly aimless meandering in the first half of season two was constructed and filmed in a way that demanded interrogation. Was it frustrating? Yes, of course—the show barely felt like the same thing we all got excited about last year. But something felt off, and intentionally so—to the point that perceptive viewers were able to guess the mid-season reveal that Elliot has been in prison the whole time on their own if they watched closely enough.

Mr. Robot is a show about programmers and coders, people who translate the complexity of the world into binary statements and if-then conditionals. The world, as you know, doesn't work like that. This is the inherent tension between life and technology, wherein the show dances. It is also the inherent contradiction at the heart of video games, a medium where designers work very hard to make you forget what you can't do—much like Mr. Robot works very hard to make you forget about what it's not telling you.

Oh, and did you know that there's a Mr. Robot video game that you can play on your smartphone right now? It's uncomfortable and engrossing and very much in step with the show. It's also an adventure game.

Ralphie

Ralphie has no memory of a phlegmatic moment from childhood but grew up to be described as composed, 'calm, cool, and collected', controlled, serene, tranquil, placid, impassive, imperturbable, unruffled... loves reading, writing, traveling, making friends and sharing thoughts. When he's not working on projects and executing startups, he is researching and writing.